Imagine, if you will, that Destiny and Minecraft had a baby. Well that baby would be the most overhyped game in quite a while, rimshot. And yet somehow, both of those statements accurately describe No Man's Sky. No Man's Sky was first announced by Hello Games, to it's own detriment at this point, back in 2013 and it set the internet on fire with it's promise of an entire universe worth of planets to explore, space battles to fight, and aliens to encounter. The game ultimately delivers on most of it's promises, but unless a game with as much hype as No Man's Sky literally comes down from on high providing simultaneous cures for AIDS and cancer while ending world hunger, it will be panned by the very same people who did the hyping in the first place.
No Man's Sky starts you out on a random planet with a broken down spaceship and a laser mining tool. You are given the objective to fix the ship so you can get off the planet. After you do that you need to find parts to fix the ship's pulse drive so you can fly faster through space. After that... Well after that pretty much everything is up to you. The game does have an ultimate objective of trying to reach the center of the universe, but whether or not you decide you want to pursue that goal is entirely up to you.
The planets you discover in No Man's Sky are huge and nicely diverse. One planet is about the size of your typical sandbox game, if not bigger, and then you remember that there's a whole universe of these planets to discover and you start to get a feel of the scale Hello Games was going for. Some planets have lush environments, filled with diverse plant and animal life in every shape and color you can imagine. The animals themselves all belong to different species, with some breeds of animals even belonging to the same species. You could spend hours or even days trying to catalog all the different types of life you find on just one of these planets. Other planets are desolate and barren, with just rocks and minerals waiting for you to come and extract them from the ground. After you finish on one planet and point your ship at the next planet in the sky, a notification comes up telling you that it would take multiple hours to reach it if you decided to take it slow the entire time. Again, the scale of the game comes to the forefront.
You also meet with three different races of aliens along your travels. The Vy'keen, Korvax, and Gek have all set up outposts on the planets that you are free to come and visit. They also preside over the space stations floating above certain planets. With the help of knowledge stones and monuments that you can find on the planets as well, you will slowly but surely learn the languages of these three races. It's extremely satisfying to go from talking to an alien early in the game and having no idea what he's trying to communicate to you, to learning many of their words and being able to piece together their sentences. The aliens you come across are looking for assistance with something, and if you correctly give them what they need you will be rewarded with a blueprint, which you can use to build better accessories for you, your ship, or your weapon.
The building of the accessories, however, is where the game's annoyances begin to crop up. The only items that stack in your inventories are the elements such as iron and plutonium. Other non-elemental items will each take up a slot in your inventory space. So if you have a blueprint that calls for, say, 5 of a certain item, you will need to have 5 spaces free for that item PLUS a 6th spot to actually construct the item itself. As you progress through the game and have better and better items taking up valuable inventory slots, you become more and more frustrated at the extremely questionable decision to not allow item stacking.
Another annoyance is with the aforementioned outposts. The plant and animal life is so diverse on each planet that it's disappointing to see that every outpost is nothing more than a copy/paste of each other on every single planet. There are some variants within the outposts themselves, but really there's only about 4 basic types that you will continue to see over and over. Even the ones that have the potential to unlock something cool are let down by repetition. As an example, you occasionally find observatories that tantalize you into unlocking them and finding a new location among the stars. However, the puzzle to unlock them is ALWAYS the same, and they ALWAYS lead you to a ruin that isn't even on a different planet. The potential for something great was there but it was severely missed.
If I'm going to continue harping on annoyances then I must mention the game's upload system. When you're exploring a planet you have the option of scanning all the plants and animals and then uploading them, sharing your discoveries with the world. You even get money for doing so, so there's certainly incentive and you want to do it. Yet inexplicably the game doesn't simply upload your finds automatically. There isn't even an option to upload everything at once. So you must tediously go through your entire records page uploading every plant, animal, and save point that you've found. Either that or completely break the flow of the game to pause every 5 seconds after you find something new to upload it. This is a massive oversight that I cannot actually believe got through any sort of quality control.
Before you decide whether or not you want to play No Man's Sky you must be completely honest with yourself about what type of gamer you are, because ultimately that is what will determine how much enjoyment you get out of the game. Are you the type that craves a story driven narrative, with characters who change over the course of their adventure? Do you like action, with every minute of the game giving you more things to shoot at and blow up? Do you like choosing your own path at your own pace, free from any sort of constraints a game might place you? All these desires are perfectly valid to have, but only those who identify with option 3 will enjoy No Man's Sky. Those people will find hours upon hours of a diverse universe to explore and enjoy.